A synthesis of the record left by Africa's earliest inhabitants combining archaeology, genetics and palaeo-environmental science.

In 1619, a group of thirty-two African men, women and children arrived on the shores of Virginia. They had been kidnapped in the royal city of Kabasa, Angola, and forced aboard the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. The ship was attacked by privateers, and the captives were taken by the English to their New World colony. This group has been shrouded in controversy ever since. Historian Ric Murphy documents a fascinating story of colonialism, treason, piracy, kidnapping, enslavement and British law.

Readers are introduced to the thoughts of a black woman who grew up second guessing her ancestry and religious beliefs. Her uncertainty came from the information she learned about the horrid past of her people. As the city she lives in continues to see gun violence become a weekly part of life she realizes little empathy was offered for one of America's most gruesome sin. But she knows deep within there's a lingering connection. Something from long ago is still haunting the mind and spirit of African people. She decides it is time to find this stronghold and confront it. The story begins with a comparison of histories; from the most talked about story of slavery in the Bible to the horrendous story of slavery in America. God sent one man to deliver the "Children of Israel" while slavery in the United States concluded with a war. Leaving her to ask the ultimate question...Did God send an Army to deliver His people this time? Now she is forced to find the answer. Now she is forced to confront her fears. As she enters the dark tunnel of time, she hears voices. Voices of those who cry out to tell their story. They come to her from the distance because they want the share the truth. They show her the imperfections but they teach us the most humane spiritual lesson of all time. Nothing could make them lose sight of their mission. Nothing could destroy their faith and no one could make them turn away from the "Almighty God" they served. They leave us the greatest legacy ever lived and together we rebuild a Nation.

The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in colonial Virginia. Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly -- the first gathering of a representative governing body in America -- came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America. In 1619, historian James Horn sheds new light on the year that gave birth to the great paradox of our nation: slavery in the midst of freedom. This portentous year marked both the origin of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial inequality that has afflicted America since its beginning.

Africa has the longest record - some 2.5 million years - of human occupation of any continent. For nearly all of this time, its inhabitants have made tools from stone and have acquired their food from its rich wild plant and animal resources. Archaeological research in Africa is crucial for understanding the origins of humans and the diversity of hunter-gatherer ways of life. This book provides an up-to-date, comprehensive synthesis of the record left by Africa's earliest hominin inhabitants and hunter-gatherers. It combines the insights of archaeology with those of other disciplines, such as genetics and palaeoenvironmental science. African evidence is critical to important debates, such as the origins of stone toolmaking, the emergence of recognisably modern forms of cognition and behaviour, and the expansion of successive hominins from Africa to other parts of the world. Africa's enormous ecological diversity and exceptionally long history also provide an unparalleled opportunity to examine the impact of environment change on human populations. African foragers have also long been viewed as archetypes of the hunter-gatherer way of life, a view that is debated in this volume. Also examined is their relevance for understanding the development and spread of food production and the social and ideological significance of the rock art that many of them have produced.

Erased by Time In 1619 twenty Africans stepped foot on American soil. They came not as slaves, but as indentured servants. They knew if they could hold on and finish out their sentences, they would be free. They came with dreams of the future and a vision of life as good as any other person's, black or white. Who were these people? How did they get here? What happened to them? Much of the information about them -- even their names -- has been lost. Stories about them are incomplete, and facts are blurred by centuries of neglect. But their stories are worth knowing and keeping and sharing, for they are a part of the American saga. This is their story.

The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods—millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example—are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots—"botanical gardens of the dispossessed"—became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.